[Dickey]

I wouldn't venture it's all bad.

On the flip side, it used to be common-place to pour your old motor oil out on a dirt road to keep the dust down.

A working professional absolutely required a team to sort and manage the various calendar appointments and data transfers (do most companies even have a mailroom anymore?). Scads of paper were burned through in order to make minor adjustments to blue prints and the like, not to mention the chemicals involved with such items too. While things were slower paced and perhaps a bit less stressful on the employee, customers would simply have to accept that getting a specification change would take weeks to determine feasibility and scope much less be implemented.

Filerooms that were once measured in thousands of cubic feet and millions of scraps of paper can now be found on a piece of silicon the size of your pinky nail...and you can search them for particular data near instantaneously.

That 300hp machine referenced above likely gets more than twice the mileage of its equivalent from 40 years ago. I know that with even a 2 liter four cylinder, it isn't unheard of to bump 300hp/200tq and still manage 30mpg on a road trip if you keep your foot out of it. Granted, they don't sound like real cars by any stretch of the imagination. That modern monster also gets to operating temperature faster and cuts noxious emissions down dramatically. Not to mention how much safer it is now that crumple zones are located in places other than passengers.

The milk and soda bottle thing is a step back, but I'm thankful at least not to find either in a bag on the shelf when I go to the store.

Some battery operated mowers navigate themselves and even the ones you have to push are extremely quiet. Not even an option back when reel type mowers were the big players on the scene.

My hassle with the current batch of curmudgeons to be is that they aren't willing to give anything up until someone takes it from them.